re-load complete

DEC 2008
back to the machine-gun has re-loaded its blog content

please use the side-bar for easeful navigation ↵ --- or flit through at random::
--- to some poems and information → about Janette Stowell, who has a book coming out ↓
---:: or to a recollection of the magazine's history → &tc

---- :: The Midnight Horror Tree by Janette Stowell

-- A launch is scheduled, as the poet herself tells us: "11th December, and it is going to be downstairs in Revolution Bar (which is just a couple of doors down from FACT)" (in Liverpool)

-- A reading of the poem GULL on youtube → about which the poet tells us: "I had to do a reading at the Whitworth a couple of weeks ago, and this is where the reading is from. I had to follow the harpist. And I was cringing: the harp music was very beautiful and I had to then read out my poems, all of which had swear fucking words in."

-- And an animation of the title poem, also on youtube →

Janette Stowell's poetries

CODE →  SMARTIES →  GULL → 

A gleeful malice revealing itself as simple life-ingrained
compassion is at the heart of Janette Stowell's poetry.

Things to note about her poetics:: —

— :: Narrative, rather cool, its first tensions do not come to a point. In this ebb (of a narrative, of a drama), a dry wry humour sort of shuttles us through misadventure, nastiness, dirty bits of life.

— :: Early in the magazine's history, Miss Stowell had experimented successfuly with what she called "cine-poems", wherein filmic scenes of varied connects and disconnects were conveyed in a distant voice often with the technical apparatus — camera movements, zooms, scene shifts — of film-making.

— :: Thinking of the narrative in "code" for example, as an extension from the cine-poem/synopsis technique — that these earlier poems were a way of narrating with objectivity, working through the problem in poetry of narrative until the cine-context was no longer needed. A new non-personal narration is what remains. Who and what, is being narrated, and how it is, is partly how these poems work. Miss Stowell has worked through the problem of narration, and found herself an area in which she is entirely capable.

Code

A man was snatched from the roadside
by four men in a black car.
Blindfolded and gagged, he was driven
through city streets. There were sounds
beyond his captors’ breathing: the buses’
knackered hydraulics, the gloat of sirens,
cathedral bells.

*

Pulled from the car, he was marched
over concrete, then up steep
Piranesian staircases. Eventually, his blindfold
and gag were removed and he was asked,
Where are you?

I am here, he thought, then looked around the room:
no furniture, no windows, walls painted brown,
scruffy floorboards. One scientist
had a gold watch and a front tooth to match.

I’m in the vault of a bank, he said.

*

He is home now, sitting in his garden,
smoking. Above the elm, the sky
is an open atlas, revealing
the chartered nooks of far-flung galaxies.
He thinks back to the brown room – a back room
of an opera house (as it turned out to be).

When released, he had caught
the opening notes of the Dies Irae
and the scientists’ whispers:

...in conclusion, it’s impossible
to comprehend place until the external
has been viewed in its entirety

universe could be packed
into a tree’s trunk

latter’s markings are certainly similar
to a planet’s concentric rings, of course
just a hunch, but still

what do you fancy for lunch?...

His stomach rumbles; the sound
is reassuring. He grinds his cigarette
into an old wormhole. At least, he hopes
it’s old. Too late now. Drilling starts up
in the neighbourhood: an electric work-tool
or a woodpecker’s illiterate Morse.

Janette Stowell

Smarties

For Margaret

Another Sunday. A stray dog sniffs
its own piss. Even the crows
are bored.

Over the road, three boys
have climbed the bus-shelter
to welly stones at passing cars
and cats.

Me and Marg have done
the slide, the frame, the swing
and are now sprawled on the broken slats
of roundabout. I’m counting out
the Smarties:

one for me
one for you
one for me
one for –

From above, a fag-furred voice:

Frig’s sake, you’d think she’d never seen
a fucking Smartie before.

It’s not God, but an older girl
with tantrum-thrower arms
and hair so greasy
it could batter conger-eels.


Our Smarties got left behind. Later,
I imagined the light bag of death
and the disappointment
when the crows discovered the brightly coloured shells
housed no sexy bugs.

Janette Stowell

Gull

For Stevo


Above the city's horns,
the gull's dirty laughter
shatters noon.

I've heard them say
the gull is a reincarnated fisherman.
I look away
when he warms his ass
on the hot-rocks of town roofs.

A great uncle once rooted feet
on the decks of hatch-battened trawlers —
cheeks birched by driving wind, salt-chewed
eyes, his gloveless palms
guided in the nets.

The gull picks fights
over lunchtime crusts,
but once he feasted on the splintered
wood of a crow's nest — with every list,
his nostrils filled with the ocean's truth.

It's a dicey flight
between birth and death,
though I've yet to see a gull's brain
liquefied on the road's edge
or his wingtips lashing
at the bars in zoos.

He preferred to box his way
down the back streets


of every great port. The one time
he fell, old sea-dogs licked iron
from his wounds.

The gull is above the city.
Surfing the sky's rollers,
he traces slate
to dock.

Years back, he knocked
great slabs of ice
from a herring boat's mast,
knowing the vessel
would soon keel.

The wind is rising.

When the incoming gale
bludgeons the coast,
the gull will continue to fuck
on the edge of a high cliff.

Janette Stowell

birth of :: issues 1 - 3

Back to the Machine-Gun in full-dimensioned magazine mode was first conceived of in the early summer of 2004 in the scenic beer garden of Ye Cracke, a Liverpool pub famous for its scenic beer garden and the presence of J.Lennon's arse every so often before he became famous enough to exit Liverpool and get himself assasinated by CIA brainwash victim Mark David Chapman. Already we are up to our cuff-links in history.

[1 [[2 [3-(a little below)] [4-in yellow] [5-pale, flower, below] & [7]x2]]]

1^st Edition - September 2004 (Bukowski quote inside cover) -* ‘Ceasefire’ (3 short poems by MP) * ‘don’t stand up in the middle of a room’ (insane angry Biblical rant by AH) * ‘Opposite Dew’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Johnny Cash’ (poem by KM) * ‘The Symphonic Democratic Violation Bomb - Part One (1945 - 73)’ (poem by SG) * ‘Alchemy of the Word’ (Rimbaud translation by KM) * ‘The Blade’s Sloppy Kiss’ (poem by AJ) * (Four untitled short poems by MP - begins: “There’s no hope of utopia”) * ‘Sub-Central’ (short prose by AJ)- (the dead socialist graffiti-photography project on back cover / distorted) -

2^nd Edition - November 2004 - * ‘A Cheap Box of Oranges’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Vincent’ (poem by JS - Janette Stowell) * ‘Saint Hood’ (4 short poems by MP) * ‘Shit on the seafront’ (underlined first line of poem as title (?) - poem by SG) * ‘Strange Re-Union’ (poem by NJ - Nathan A Jones) * ‘adventure story for boys’ (short story by AH) * ‘Vagina’ (poem by JS) * ‘The Symphonic Democratic Violation Bomb - Part Two (1964 - 01)’ (poem by SG) * ‘Drive’ (poem by AJ) * ‘The writer + his Annihilation Part 1’ (writers manifesto by MP) * ‘The Squeezed Juice of Midnight’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Go rimbaud, go go rimbaud’ (poem by KM) - (Rimbaud’s last letter inside back cover) - - (the dead socialist graffiti-photography project on back cover / distorted) -

3^rd Edition - the schoolgirl issue - June 2005 (1^st editorial / cut up / inside cover) - * ‘It’s True’ (Michel Houellebecq translation by AJ) * ‘War’ (4 poems by SG) * ‘A small glow’ (poem by GS - Gary Smillie) * ‘Haiku’ (by AJ) * ‘Bitter Bites Lemon, Boy’ (another prose rant by AH) * ‘On the Napkin’ (shorts from Everyman by JS and KM) * ‘The Opposite of a Date’ (poem by AJ) * ‘Two Saint Poems (10, 15)’ (by MP) * ‘Synopsis Seurre Noir’ (poem by JS) - * ‘still life’ (poem by MP) * ‘Adequate Rope’ (poem by KM) * ‘The Dissection of an Argument (How to win)’ (theoretical nonsense essay by AH) - * ‘Contemporary fiction’ (poem by AJ) - (the dead socialist graffiti-photography project on back cover / distorted) -

What seems like an ending may turn into a rebirth. As of now, Back to the Machine Gun is in an uncertain flux. Member have moved, to different cities, to different continents. All sorts of things always get in the way. It becomes hard to see what has been achieved despite all the push and pull, not only of the usual demands of life, but also of distance, of mistook words, of resentments and callous egos, the common turmoil of anything really.

more poems will be linked in the future
&
a more casual overview of all issues here →